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hortly after Muse came off the Drones World Tour, which found them flying actual drones over the audience, the U.K. rockers' tour director, Glen Rowe, shared his dreams of doing something even more adventurous the next time out while speaking at a music conference in London.

We want to do a stage made of magnets," he said, "so the band can levitate on other magnets.”

So we ask Dom Howard whether there's some element of levitation going on in Muse's Simulation 

Theory World Tour, which launched Feb. 22 in Houston.

"Well, he’s said a lot of things," Howard says with a laugh when reminded of Rowe's comments.

"I mean, quantum levitation is not quite user-friendly enough yet for mass viewing. Maybe one day. Unfortunately, in the world of concerts, people are still relying on wires and pulleys."

They're still a week out from rehearsals when the drummer phones from London to discuss the tour.

“Those ‘80s visions of the future were really quite something.”

Dom Howard

 

"It’s just gonna be mental, I think," Howard says with a laugh. "It’s gonna be like a crazy, theatrical, otherworldly rock concert experience of some kind."

At first, they were thinking of stripping it down a bit, he says. "But actually, it feels like it’s gone even further, even more extravagant than before in many ways. It’s just so different from the last tour that I can’t wait to get it up and running."

The show will incorporate other performers, Howard says, including singers, musicians and "physical performers," as he puts it.

"We wanted to move away from just a band playing on stage with a screen in the background playing a bunch of stuff on it, which is something we just feel like everyone seems to be doing these days," he says. 

"We wanted to have more people, more performers with us on stage and have the whole thing be more theatrical. And yet have this bit more humanity in the show rather than just tech, which is kind of what the last tour was about."

The Drones Tour was great, Howard says. "But it felt like an ominous tech invasion on your senses, whereas this one, we want it to feel more like a celebration of humanity that also sort of transports you to a different universe in some ways."